Tech@Sakana – A sysadmin’s blog

In case you read this blog only through the RSS feeds, you might not have noticed the few new pages on the left hand menu bar. Those pages are dynamically generated by pulling the RSS feed of my del.icio.us bookmarks for specific tag combinations (like wordpress+plugin+must).

Feel free to have a look from time to time, to check for modifications !

For now, you’ll find :

• a book list
• a list of my most used Firefox plugins
• a list of y favorite free (like beer) softwares
• and my favorite wordpress plugins

And in case you wonder, those pages are generated thanks to the wonderful inlineRSS wordpress plugin, which makes pulling RSS feeds from your blog damn easy.

Wordpress is a great blogging platform, which will let you easily publish your blog. Now, considering the amount of time you’ll probably spend writing contents, you might want to get money from it (all work deserves money, right ? ).

I’ll show you how to do this easily, by using the advertisement program of Google : AdSense.
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A little follow up on yesterday article about scripting Twitter with cURL: the solution was working, but somehow inconvenient. Not practical to have to go and fetch the user id every time you want to send a direct message !

This time, I scripted Twitter direct message with Perl and LWP (libwww-perl), for a much more convenient solution. I designed it to be used like a sort of universal paging service.

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Twitter already provides an API but it is currently very limited. It will let you fairly easily change your status, but won’t let you send a direct message.

Comes in cURL. cURL is a very versatile command line utility which is designed to script web pages interactions. As a little demo, I’ll show you how to use it to easily overcome the shortcomings of Twitter’s API.

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If you don’t know yet about Twitter, you might want to have a look at my previous article about it.
One of its neat features is the (previously written about) ability to send direct messages to your friends.

This feature will let you easily send free SMS from your computer to any of your friends. (more…)